Some 55 percent of Taiwanese businesses surveyed have had difficulties collecting their debts in China, according to the results of a poll made public yesterday by the Importers and Exporters Association of Taipei.
While more than half of the respondents said that they had direct experience of being unable to collect money owed to them from Chinese debtors, 78 percent of them said that it was private Chinese enterprises who were the main culprits.
As it was expensive for them to recover their debts through legal action, 41 percent of the respondents said that negotiations were the best way to resolve the problem, while 31 percent suggested continuous pressure would be the most effective way to make Chinese firms pay their debts, the poll results show.
According to the survey results, more than 80 percent of the China-based Taiwanese businesses polled had confidence in the credibility of foreign and Taiwanese companies, ahead of only 31 percent and 17 percent who thought Chinese state-run and private enterprises were credible, respectively.
As all kinds of fraud, scams and counterfeiting are rampant in China, foreign businessmen, including those from Taiwan, must pay a great deal of attention when doing business there, the association said.
Since China entered the WTO and opened its market to foreign-owned ventures, the issue of how to collect payment from Chinese companies has become an extremely difficult problem owing to what experts described as the low level of China's entrepreneurial culture.
Currently, more than 71 percent of Taiwan's outbound investment has landed on the other side of the Taiwan Strait, which Premier Su Tseng-chang (
"We should constantly remind our businessmen of the risk of putting all their eggs in one basket," Su said, while meeting with a party of young US Democratic Party rising stars who are in Taipei for a visit.
"We have not forbidden our entrepreneurs from venturing into the Chinese market. We just encourage them to adopt a global perspective and integrate their China forays into their global development plans," Su said.
He also warned that Chinese authorities have often used their economic clout to force Taiwanese businesspeople operating in China to support their political appeals that are detrimental or hostile to Taiwan.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained